Reading both entertaining and educational

Not too long ago, I finished reading Jean Webster's Daddy Long-Legs, a novel from 1912 that might be seeing a resurgence in readership after being featured in one of the Mother-Daughter Book Club books, which is why I picked it up. It's a series of letters from an orphan to her benefactor, a trustee of the orphan asylum where she grew up (maybe a prototype of Daddy Warbucks?). He pays to send her to a girls' college with the only stipulation being that she write him monthly letters.  It is a bit sappy in that early twentieth century way, but the heroine Jerusha (who nicknames herself Judy) develops a sense of independence and diligence that shows her rough upbringing has made her resilient and persevering.  Her background is in stark contrast to her wealthy roommate's.  While she envies the beauty of her rich roommate's wardrobe, she comments more than once on this friend's apathy and notes that because this girl has always had her wants and needs met, she has no real understanding of what it means to be happy. Judy comes to appreciate her early hardknock life that makes her so grateful for the gifts she has received and the beautiful things she learns about and sees.

This book offers another take on the benefit of hardships and setbacks, a hundred years ago. Again, not much changes about human nature. Thinking back to a previous post, we can tinker with school methods and parenting styles, but a kid's temperament is innate. Some kids will do better at school, some at home. Some may falter for a few years before returning to the faith. A few missteps in youth are inevitable, perhaps. But happiness lies in recognizing, with gratitude, the things of beauty around you and their transience, things that may be fleeting or taken away. Like innocence and babyhood.  But even mourning and loss can become a beautiful, happy thing because something new is on the way.

So that paragraph is a little Pollyannaish in the same way as Daddy Long-Legs, but my current state of feeling caught in limbo needs cheerleader reminders of the benefits of suffering. Not that my suffering compares to that of poor orphans - mine is a "poor me" syndrome. I feel like I can't start anything like a job or training for something because in a few months life will change dramatically.  I keep having these moments where I see other women succeeding at their jobs, and I think, I could have done something like that. I have an ambitious/competitive streak that has been frustrated by circumstances and choices.  I know the choices I've made have been made for good reasons, but I haven't yet been able to silence the voice of vanity.  Plus, I don't like our house, but at least in two years we'll be moving again. I'm feel perpetually caught in a state of stasis waiting for insight. Maybe I should take up a letter writing campaign like Judy.

The other book I read last week was an attempt to avoid stagnating too much. Robert Scholes The Crafty Reader was a collection of essays on reading as a craft - a practice that can be learned and improved through, well, practice.  We all should become better readers, meaning more insightful, more thoughtful, he argues. But I didn't finish the book with a very clear sense of what the craft of reading is or why it is important (even though I could name some reasons myself - to develop empathy, imagination, critical thinking, cultural literacy, a sense of the limits and expanses of human nature, including its fall and redemption, etc. Did I link to this article "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy" at the Guardian before? ). Scholes doesn't like the New Critics, so most of the book is a critique of their criticism, which, he argues, presents reading as an art that requires a sort of genius in order to excel. I might disagree with that view, although I haven't read deeply in the New Critics since grad school, when perhaps I was more sympathetic to a high concept of art. I appreciate the New Critics insistence on reading the text closely to discover meaning. Of course, knowledge of the cultural and historical context of a work is important to grasp meaning, as is knowledge of an author's oeuvre, but when all you have access to are the words on a page, reading closely is your only means to uncover meaning.

I do appreciate Scholes emphasis on debunking students' fear of poetry. He points out that most students believe poetry (and most literary fiction) has a secret meaning that they have to discover. They don't like poetry because they don't like hunting for symbols and tone.  Against the New Critics preference for formal, unsentimental, artistic poetry, Scholes advocates for teaching narrative poetry and poetry with emotional intensity.

I can see the value of this, especially with young students or students like those in my community college class who had little or no previous experience with reading poetry. While cool and restrained poetry may make good art, emotional and exuberant poetry is sometimes more enjoyable to read until a greater familiarity with poetic form and language is gained. I am happy to report that my elementary students have been busy memorizing poems for their school's "Dialogues and Monologues" event coming up. Three of the four chose narrative verse. My eighth grader is doing the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy because he likes to talk in a British accent and pose in a Shakespearean manner.

Scholes also criticizes the reliance on poetic terms that fit the needs of standardized tests, but produce a mechanical and artificial reading of poetry. He wants poetry to be brought close to the lives of students, for students to see that way that poetic language describes the ordinary events of their lives (why I loved Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"), so that they enjoy it and want to read it.  Here I quibble with him again.  Without knowing what a metaphor or symbol is, without appreciating the pleasure of alliteration and assonance, or the disturbance of dissonance, students don't appreciate the full power of poetic language. I agree that poetry shouldn't be taught as a vocabulary course so that teachers can easily grade exams, but I do think students, especially in the upper grades, need to know the language of the discipline, just as biology students need to know about micro- and macrobiomes and algebra students need to understand polynomials. So I both agree and disagree with Scholes' critique.

Here are the main aspects of the craft of reading poetry that Scholes delineates:
-Read first for prose sense, noting punctuation and word meaning and patterns (particularly for poetry)
-Situate the text - what situation is described, who's the speaker, who is addressed?
- What historical context can you glean about the author's life and world?
- What event or condition is represented?
- Is the work meant to persuade?
-What emotion is generated?
- What is your response or evaluation?

The other interesting chapter in his book compared Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali - the surreal and the hyperreal being related ways of interpreting signs and symbols. Scholes praises Rockwell for highlighting discrepancies between the real thing and the image he created, focusing on Rockwell's self portrait. While Rockwell was often dismissed as simply being an illustrator, or for making art for the common man, not high art, he is increasingly gaining more critical praise.

I make these notes for any future use. Maybe one day I'll teach the craft/art of reading again. I wish Scholes had gone a little further in advancing his idea of how to be a crafty ready and why, rather than giving examples of poems that the New Critics didn't like, but that he deems worthy of attention. I appreciate his encouragement of letting students study the poetry they like first - narrative and emotionally charged verse.

Meanwhile I'm on to something else: currently enjoying what would appear to be an emotionally restrained book to today's readers, but might have been emotionally intense in its day: Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her, despite it being the WORST formatted ebook ever.  The heroine is an independently minded young lady who can't decide if she wants to marry a husband who will be solid and dependable, but her master, or a rather rash, adventurous young man whom she could assist with her money in gaining and keeping a seat in Parliament. Will she be ambitious or practical? Will she choose the mate who will take care of all her needs but treat her as a kind of adult child or the man who might break her heart but who values her mind? Perhaps I'm reading a modern sensibility into this, because in last night's chapter the good, solid guy showed a new side in his desire to win the heart of his betrothed. He treated her quite nobly. Maybe he'll end up being more compassionate than it first appears.

Another book about books and reading for spiritual growth

Sometimes it’s hard to justify time spent reading novels and other books, especially when I have a list a couple pages long of things that need to be done. Instead of full bookshelves, I could have a clean house, or have made some nice handcrafts, or I could be in better shape, or have a more interesting blog. I also would be a nicer person if I didn’t stay up late to finish my latest library find. Of course, a lot of my reading is crammed into little pockets of time spent waiting for kids or waiting for appointments or hiding in the bathroom, so that time would have been empty if not filled with reading, but occasionally I feel like I have to apologize for the hours I spend between covers.


Which is why I nabbed Nancy Malone’s Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading when I saw it on the end of the library shelf. Once I wrote a paper on the sacramentality of reading, so when I saw the subtitle, I again kicked myself on not doing something with that paper, although in reality it was a rambling mess that probably bordered on heretical.


Malone’s book is primarily a memoir of a reading life. Her story is interesting – she is an Ursuline nun who found healing in books after struggling with a midlife dark night of the soul that turned into alcoholism. But I picked up Malone’s book to find theological arguments for why it is okay to read instead of doing the dishes in the evening. And I found some good evidence. Malone doesn’t just provide a story about how reading changed her in multiple ways, although reading was a means of conversion, similar to St. Augustine’s “take and read” moment. She also makes a case for reading, not spiritual books, but novels and biographies, as a form of meditation and participation in the communion of saints.


It’s a pretty easy conclusion to make: Reading and meditation resemble each other – you are alone, silent, still, attentive, engaged:

"These moments of wholeness, experienced sometimes in reading, sometimes in prayer, give us hints at what can be said about spirituality and reading, about a spirituality of reading. Such is the human condition, however, that even when we devote ourselves entirely to a book (or to prayer) we don’t bring a completed, finished self to it. Think, for instance, of the novels that spoke to you when you were eighteen, that you regard as superficial or exaggerated now. Or think of revisiting one of the classics, only to discover a different, deeper book than the one you read decades ago. It’s not the books that have changed. It is you yourself".

So reading, even when it doesn’t seem to change you outwardly, can still effect a conversion – the soul engaged in reading is in motion, a soul growing, not stagnating.


Malone also points out how, like contemplative prayer, reading takes us out of ourselves. It engages us in conversation with another mind, who instructs and refines our way of thinking. She uses the image of the labyrinth to describe the search for the “true self” in the sense of Thomas Merton’s usage as God within, a search that is circular and that moves both inward and outward toward others. Reading should be a conversation between the self and others - “an exchange of selves” with the book, the author, the characters, the people who read that book. It should force us to ask questions and reflect to understand, to become “discerning, responsible readers.” This questioning pulls us out of ourselves. In the total immersion of reading, we transcend ourselves. Malone clarifies: “what I mean by a spirituality of reading – the search for the true self in reading, for the self that sees the world with the faith that Jesuit Bernard Lonergan calls ‘the eye of love.’”

It’s not a hard argument to make, that books teach us to love. When we enter into the world of a book, we see with someone else’s eyes. We become more compassionate. Writers create worlds with their words, and we become co-creators in our imaginations. We form relationships with our books when we spend time with them. Books become our friends; they help us enter into the communion of saints. Words take flesh, as Malone points out – a kind of transubstantiation. Even secular reading can be a religious experience in this sense. Malone particularly likes biographies because they “refract the mystery of a human life, with its challenges, accomplishments, failures, and suffering, and a human personality in its ineluctable givenness.” They answer the question of what life is about.


Malone continues to compare reading to contemplative prayer when she writes about how reading teaches us to avoid distraction. I loved this quote: “A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere, even in an airport waiting room.” And this one from Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy – “The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God. . . . it must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.” When we’re reading a good book, we aren’t yearning to be doing something else; we’re totally involved in the story. All of our senses are engaged.

And when our senses are engaged, we are delighting in creation. Good writing gives us pleasure; it teaches us to love like Augustine’s love for God from Confessions:

“What is it that I love when I love my God? … It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God – a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where, for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel; and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished; and that clings close which no satiety disports – this is what I love when I love my God.”

Malone also tells how Ignatius of Loyola found spiritual consolation as from reading the life of Christ – it energized him for missionary work, while romances sapped his spirit, and left him lethargic. She also recounts Virginia Woolf’s story from her essay “How One Should Read a Book” about how St. Peter gives out rewards to different saints, but when he sees a reader, he comments that Heaven has nothing to offer people who have loved to read.

Malone remarks on some of the pleasures of reading: intellectual, humor, sensual, the “joy of recognition.” She sees herself in characters from Middlemarch, and in a book about an alcoholic I’m unfamiliar with: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Books create connection. “Books contain both our memories and our hopes, shape them, in some cases create them.” Wayne Booth puts it like this in The Rhetoric of Fiction: “There is a pleasure from learning the simple truth, and there is pleasure from learning that the truth is not simple.” We enjoy insights into human complexity. We enjoy grammatically complex language that reflects our complexity.


And sometimes we’re like Kafka, and like books that shake us: Kafka recommends books “That bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as thought we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Even if some books do not change us themselves, they help us see how life changes us. We recognize truth in statements like Zossima’s observation that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams” from The Brothers Karamazov.

This delight in recognition and in the beauty and unity of a story is a spiritual delight. Imagination is necessary both for reading and faith. Great writers are part of “so great a cloud of witnesses” -- “they have finely observed and given testimony to the mysteries of life and personality to motive, intention, and action, to passion and suffering and death, to love and hatred, to hope and fear, to evil, to bliss, to the beauty of nature and our powerlessness under its ravages, to our struggle with human movements and institutions, to our search for meaning and the good, and some of them, explicitly, to our search for God.”

Reading gives us “Hope that there is a God whose extravagant fecundity is the source of the mysterious creative impulse of the artists among us. That there is in life the kind of wholeness achieved in a great work of literature – a master narrative in which, though we cannot always see how, your story and mine have their part.”

Since reading is often a contemplation of love, it helps us to be in love. Malone quotes Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk in lecture “the Human Condition”: “If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, then we have more work to do, because that is who we really are.” Reading and writing help us love without restrictions, to see with “the eye of love.”

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As I was reading this book, I also learned about some trials that some friends are experiencing – one a sick child, the other a philandering husband. I don’t know that either of these friends are big readers. But it crossed my mind that if I were in their situations, books would be my props to keep standing. I remember writing in my high school journal once after reading some book about adultery that I thought that I would be able to forgive my husband for infidelity because so many people fail in so many ways. I think whatever I had read gave me some tortured understanding about the capacity of the soul for sin and redemption. Maybe the book I had read made the communal devastation of a failed marriage seem worse than remaining in a marriage in which trust had been compromised. Maybe reading had made me feel that no person is deserving of complete trust. We all fail in that. Only God never betrays us. Even when He allows us to suffer pains like a child who is ill. And stories help us deal with these pains, both by giving us a framework to fit our experience into and by giving us examples of others who have suffered and survived, and by giving us other worlds to hide in while we're suffering.

Affective books

I really had good intentions of writing something reflective for Holy Week; instead I have been chewing on thoughts about what Ten Books Have Influenced Me the most. This list is going around at multiple blogs. I already whiled away more time than I care to admit looking at other people’s lists, before I decided to write my own. Limited to 10 books, I’m going to skip over some of the picture books that I loved and formed an aesthetic (thinking of Tasha Tudor books, D’Aulaires book of Greek Myths, and the English Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham), the Bible, and Jane Austen. I’d like to say Shakespeare was an influence, but I can’t think of any behavior modifications that accompanied my reading of him, except that I look for Shakespeare in the Park performances to attend in the summer. Nearly every place we’ve lived has them. Not sure about here, seeing that the heat and mosquitoes make a summer evening in a park sound like something out of the Inferno, instead of Shakespeare.



So here are a few that came to mind, roughly in chronological order of my encounter with them:

1. Anne of Green Gables – confirmed that mooning about was a worthwhile way to spend time. I didn’t have a grove of bridal blooms near my house, only a vacant lot to hide in, but it had enough trees to become a woods in which to live an imaginary life.

2 .Gone with the Wind – one of the first adult books I read. Influenced my interest in the South and Southern literature, although it certainly didn’t make any college reading lists. As a fifth grader I sat in our blue velvet Queen Anne chair and weeped when Rhett finally walked out on Scarlet. I’m almost afraid to admit how much I loved and admired Scarlet and wanted to be a strong woman just like her. I also loved that I could succeed at Trivial Pursuit because so many questions asked about the book or the movie, also a favorite.

3. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Green – a book I wanted to steal from the library. Suddenly I wanted to fall in love with somebody, anybody. I haven’t reread this book since middle school – I wonder if I should go back to it or if some spell would be broken. I can't say that the book itself really influenced the way I live, but it led to a fascination with World War II and the writers formed by it, so it influenced what I read.

4. The Closing of the American Mind – Dramatically narrowed my college search to universities with a Great Books program. John Henry Newman's Idea of a University confirmed this choice, as did The Sacred Wood by T.S. Eliot, in particular "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which changed the way I read books.

5. Brothers Karamazov – A moving answer to how to live and how not to live. My quick answer to "What is your favorite book?"

6. Confessions - Augustine’s defense of beauty as a way of knowing God eased doubts left over from adolescent rebellions/investigations

7. Love and Responsibility – why I am married and have 6 children. Assigned by a professor who opened my eyes to the beauty of the Catholic faith and to a countercultural way to raise a family. This professor went on to translate The Theology of the Body. I also borrowed his oldest son’s name for my secondborn, a name now popularized by our current Pope.

8. Wendell Berry’s work – confirmed and elevated a desire (perhaps rooted in the Little House books) to live an agrarian life. But we can’t all live in the country, so second best perhaps is the new urbanist ideal of human scaled cities, where you live close to where you work, shop, learn and worship. An ideal fed by my husband’s reading.

9. Design Your Own Classical Curriculum by Laura Berquist – opened my eyes to homeschooling, our way of life for four years, for which I still feel nostalgic. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver and Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun, both given to me by my grandfather, also fueled an interest in alternative education, after I had spent a certain number of years feeding an adolescent disrespect for teachers.

10. There are a handful of spiritual books that have informed my theological beliefs and habits. Like many people, C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was my introduction to theology. And it was perhaps the first book I read with an interest in learning about and amending my own life. Simone Weil’s "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View Toward the Love of God" from Waiting for God, and Kathleen Norris’ Quotidian Mysteries, both embodying a St. Teresian attentiveness to little things, (but in more appealing writing styles), and Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis, which, since I grew up the child of converts, was the first saint’s biography I ever read (no Vision saint books in my past), formed my ideas about what a Christian life looks like.  And finally, Pope John Paul II was the first and only Pope I knew of for most of my life, and his writings, perhaps especially Familiaris Consortio, were revolutionary to me.  An antidote to wanting to be a Scarlet.

Still need to work on self-discipline in the practice of making lists...

Three recent reads

Last week I read or skimmed three books. Their juxtaposition made clear their quality. First was The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, by Michael Lewis, which I read for the Navy spouses’ book club, (which is really a get together, drink coffee, and talk club – but always interesting). This is one of those books that may be a better movie. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble and skimmed over it in about half an hour while the three year old played with the Thomas Trains. I can see why many like it: it’s inspiring and about football and you can read it quickly. But it reads like a Sunday newspaper feature, and a fairly artless one.



Then I read Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. I keep seeing recommendations for Hornby’s books, and this is the first I’ve read. It was engaging, clever, and has a resolution you feel satisfied with. And you can read it quickly. The characters are recognizable – and since the point of view gets passed to each of them, you can identify somewhat with them all, although I’m probably most like the dowdy Maureen, unfortunately. It’s the story of 4 down in the mouth strangers who meet on the roof of an apartment building to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve. None of them can do something so private with an audience, so they head downstairs and go to a party. Unintentionally, over a period of three months, they end up helping each other find a purpose to live, or at least to work through their current dark spots. There were some good lines and memorable scenes, but not a book you’d go back and read again, unless you were bored or were having a conversation with someone about it. It actually would make a better book club book.

Then one night I started in on Lolita. This is not a book that should be read quickly, but I didn’t actually mean to reread it. I had picked up the Library of America collection of Nabokov’s novels from the 1955-1962 because I wanted to read Pnin, another regularly recommended book, but Lolita was the first novel included in the collection. I remember reading it originally while sitting between the stacks in college, supposedly reading something for a paper, but sneaking this in. But I couldn’t remember the ending. Embarrassing, but a talent that allows me to reread with greater pleasure. I had meant to reread it after reading Reading Lolita in Tehran some time ago, but never got around to it, and really wasn’t sure I wanted to because the book makes you feel so uncomfortable, like you need to hide it behind the covers of another book or hide yourself while you read. Which I did. I just meant to read the last couple of chapters to refresh my memory. But it is an artfully told tale, and I couldn’t stop flipping forward a few more pages and then a few more. I finally returned to the beginning after getting about halfway backwards. Fascinating, revolting, enchanting – like Nabokov really did incant some spell while writing it. That it was his first book in English is astounding – the lyrical language confounds the horror of the content.


The afterward, in which Nabokov describes the development of the book, raises the issue of whether the book was “lewd” or not. He says the techniques he used in the beginning “misled” some readers into thinking it was going to follow a pattern of successive erotic scenes, and he assumes that many of his initial readers for publication didn’t finish the book and thought the theme one of three untouchable taboos, the other two being interracial marriage and the good atheist. That comment dates the book.


Also interesting: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” . . . “It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.”



So to read and write for “aesthetic bliss” – an elevated sort of pleasure, a state of enlightenment – is his goal. Sounds zen-like. But that quote dovetails into the idea of reading as sacramental – a vehicle for encountering beauty that makes you aware of the possibility of transcendence – of God. The first two books I read won’t get you there, although to its credit A Long Way Down addresses the idea of God and of connecting with others to make life worth living. But Lolita does leave you in a state of altered consciousness.

He closes with this:

“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses – the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions – which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”

Imagine if he had written in Russian. But maybe the alien language of creation creates a more intriguing, alienated character.

It is obvious that the “best” book of the three is Lolita. At some point as a preteen, I remember thinking what made one book better than another? I loved everything I read. Which is, I suppose, why I ended up majoring in a great books program. But the question is, do you ignore content because of the artistry of the creation? It is another one of those books that have become cultural icons, but are monuments to a sort of nihilism, or a religion in which art is God.